The Honey - Don't List

The lawn is wet and chilly; it’s such a stark contrast to the inferno inside that for a minute, it seems impossible that I haven’t imagined all of it: the fight, the crash of a glass, the explosion of flames. But we turn and look: the living room burns brightly, lighting up the house in a display of sparks and fire now greedily lapping at the connected garage, the huge covered porch, the second story. Against the backdrop of stars, the blaze is strangely beautiful.

The four of us stand, not touching, staring at the disaster of it. I imagine after escaping a fire, some people might huddle together, might hold each other for comfort. I feel the distance between the four of us in the cold air against my arms. We all feel like strangers to each other in the sharp, quiet tension.

When I look at Carey, she doesn’t look back at me, even though I know she can feel the heat of my attention. I love you, I think. I’m sorry. But I’m sure the only thing she’s thinking is: What happens next? The growing flames are reflected in her eyes, and when she looks over at the Tripps, they fill with tears.

Melissa nearly killed Rusty but instead, she set what has to be at least a ten-million-dollar house on fire. Their careers are ruined, their marriage is over, but the only person I care about is Carey. I don’t want her career to be over before it’s even started. It wasn’t just Melissa and Rusty who built this empire, it was Carey, too, and I know what it’s like to be attached to a scandal like this. She’s watching her life’s work vanish, the Comb+Honey reputation going up in flames, and—after tonight—probably feeling like there’s truly never been anyone in her corner. Regret is a tight, aching ball in my chest. I fucked up. We all fucked up so big, and I’m in love with her. The weight of guilt presses down so heavily that I find it hard to breathe.

PEOPLE MAGAZINE EXCLUSIVE

Melissa Tripp Is Ready to

Pass the Torch

Melissa Tripp knew that her life was becoming overloaded, but she never expected to find herself standing in front of a burning house on the night of her show premiere, with very little memory of what happened.

The 44-year-old New Spaces star and bestselling author opens up to PEOPLE about getting sober after the fire, finding a new place for herself outside of the home renovation world, and realizing she “had to take responsibility for where I was, and what my life had become.”

“Rusty has made mistakes—and he owns those,” the petite blonde says, looking even smaller where she is engulfed in the pillows of a white couch in the Jackson Hole home she shares with her husband of more than 25 years, Russell Tripp, 45. “But my mistakes, although maybe harder to see with the naked eye, are just as numerous—if not more so.

“Our business took off, and I got real intense,” she says, laughing, and her native Tennessee accent curls around her words. “Anyone who knows me can easily imagine it. Russ isn’t an intense guy. He wants a simple life, with a solid marriage. He never wanted this wife in stilettos, dragging fancy suitcases around on a book tour. He wants a hammer in his hand, a Rockies cap on his head, and a wife teasing him and loving him in equal measure. I lost track of the girl he fell in love with somewhere. I need to remember who she is.”

Tripp acknowledges that the marriage, once believed from the outside to be perfect, is as real and flawed as any other. “We’re working through a lot, but I hope we’ll make it out the other side intact.”

These real flaws, she insists, are why she and Russell were the perfect people to write their recent #1 New York Times bestseller, an ironically timed book on marital advice entitled New Life, Old Love. “You don’t want to hear advice from someone who’s never been through it. Russ and I have been through it, and through it … and through it,” she says with a laugh. “We don’t get to choose when things fall apart. If we did, we sure would have chosen a different week.”

The home décor guru, recently out of a three-week hospital stay for what her publicist describes as “debilitating stress,” says she sees life with much clearer eyes now. “When you work so hard to get to the top, the only thing that starts to matter is staying there. You stop seeing your loved ones as loved ones. They become either leverage or barriers, and to me there stopped being anything in between.”

Tripp plans to detail what she calls her “total breakdown” in an upcoming memoir. Writing, she tells PEOPLE, “has become my safe space. Putting words down—my words, just mine—has become the only creative place inside my head I can still trust myself to go.”